The 66th Annual Grammy Awards took place on February 4th. Composer Carla Patullo was nominated alongside Kristen Agresta-Copely, Omar Akram and others for the “Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album.” When the winner was announced it was tears and joy all around for Carla and her team. Carla thanked them and her wife and stated, “I began writing this album when I was going through breast cancer and I made it to the other side because of these courageous women who did this experimental trial thirty- years ago that saved my life and this is for them.”
“So She Howls,” now a Grammy award winning album, follows Carla’s journey to healing. During her treatment Carla began to become familiar with binaural beats. “I noticed how this music that they were playing with binaural beats, would really heal my anxiety. I started reading up on them, and they’re very interesting. Basically, you have these two different tones that are playing simultaneously… The frequency range where it lies actually scientifically has been proven to alter the state of your mind and different moods and so I was experimenting with that because anxiety was something that was really hard for me. I’m healthy now and lucky and grateful for it but you know, when you’re going through a health scare, or any trauma, dealing with the mental part about it, and the anxiety for me was the hardest part. So I really wanted to create something that could kind of guide a journey through relief and take the listener somewhere.”
The album gave Carla something to focus on besides cancer. “It really came out of this necessity at first, there were some very unknown things in the beginning of what I was going through, and I just needed something to look forward to everyday… I was at this point where [I thought] maybe I’ll finish this album, and I could see this like maybe I’m gonna survive this and adjust step by step. It wasn’t until the Grammys that I was even comfortable talking about it, because talking about it, sometimes that can be a trigger. You’re very vulnerable when you talk about things that are unknown and scary and someone could say something so small, meaning well but it could bring anxiety and fear in you. So I felt very protective of that. But as I’ve opened up about it, the community, especially in the music community, people have reached out to me who are going through similar situations, or someone very close to them went through this, and it’s elevated me and brought me to even another point of healing, to not feel alone in it, and to hear stories of survivorship. I realized how powerful that is.”
Carla describes the process of recording the album as being very raw. “I set up a microphone and I recorded some tracks of just me howling. This is how ‘So She Howls’ came about because getting it out, and not even thinking about the arrangements or anything, just that feeling needed to come out. There were no lyrics and because I had no words. I just needed this raw body sound coming out of my voice. So a lot of those tracks, I kept them because there was a point where I normally would re-record these… I’m like ‘No, I need to preserve this moment.’ These are real emotions happening in time and it kinda reminds me what recording an album is all about.”
From concept to release, “So She Howls” has been a multi-year project. “It was very piece by piece. There was a lot of pausing in between it where I wasn’t writing. I just took time off or… there were just different hang-ups physically that I was dealing with that made it impossible. As I was able to get back to it, it just started to flow.” It was a different experience to many of the film scores Carla has composed with a tight deadline. “I do love these personal projects not having that deadline. The beautiful thing is, when you write something and you give it a little space, and then you come back to it – you can hear it a different way. It’s just a gift to have that space with your albums.”
Carla’s win was a significant moment for her career. When I spoke to her prior to the Grammys she shared her feeling on her nomination, “I feel so grateful for it. Just the recognition from the music community is really, really amazing. I have all this excitement about where this will take me musically but I also am reflecting on the fact of where I was where I began it and just to be going to the Grammys… I’m thrilled for everybody to be in the category with me and but just to come from this point of where I was this low and come to here, it really makes it built on that survival momentum.”
Discover more from in Vol. 34
